Smith’s legacy to the world
So what did we learn about Adam Smith during Tercentenary Week that might inspire us to dig out those neglected copies of his seminal works, 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments' (published 1759) and 'An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations' (1776) or, better still, to pick up these books for the very first time?
We learned which forces shaped his worldview as he traversed from his fishing village childhood to international fame and fortune. In Company Theatre Productions brought this journey to life at the Adam Smith 300 Symposium in 'The Life & Times of Adam Smith', a play that revealed the debates Smith took part in with other celebrated men of the time, like Hume and Rousseau, that helped mould his ideas.
We learned that Smith was a fierce critic of slavery and a despiser of the likes of the East India Company. “'The Wealth of Nations' is a recipe book for how to stop people being poor and miserable,” Professor Ben Friedman of Harvard University told Symposium audience members, “an attack on the new mercantile leaders who maximised their profits and cared little for the poor.”
We learned about how to create markets with morality. Professor Diane Coyle of Cambridge University illustrated the tensions: “We’ve got a food system that creates highly processed foods that are making people ill. We’ve got a pharmaceutical industry that requires people to stay sick and in some extreme cases has killed its patients. We’ve got a financial system that has impoverished millions of taxpayers through repeated crises. We’ve got a system that is not working.”
And we learned about Smith’s role as a pillar of the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith marvelled at the power of markets and competition to improve society – improvements, he concluded, that come naturally as each person acts in their own simple self-interest.
Smith’s ideas have since been applied across the political spectrum, cited by figures as diverse as Karl Marx, Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Thatcher. And his sophisticated observations of human behaviour and the effects of markets and productivity have shaped the world we know today.